P&G Children's Safe Drinking Water Program Shares Four Billionth Liter of Clean Water

The Procter & Gamble Co. (P&G) announced it has provided its four billionth liter of clean drinking water through the P&G Children's Safe Drinking Water Program (CSDW). With the help of Friends in Need (of “Pa”) Foundation and the Thai Red Cross, P&G was able to distribute the four billionth liter to a family in Thailand who survived the country's worst flooding in half a century.

When floods swept through Thailand earlier this year, P&G began working with humanitarian and retail partners to distribute water purification packets and educate communities on how to quickly purify water. After watching a demonstration, a young woman used a packet to transform a bucket of floodwater into the four billionth liter of clean drinking water shared through CSDW.

"This is an incredible milestone for our program and something we've worked towards for over seven years," said Marc Pritchard, global brand building officer at P&G. "We are now sharing more than one billion liters of clean drinking water every year and getting closer to our goal of providing two billion liters a year to save one life every hour by 2020."

The flooding in Thailand was indiscriminate, and for the first time since CSDW's launch in 2004, P&G's own employees were in need of the purification packets. Despite transportation difficulties and destroyed infrastructure, P&G and its CSDW partners have shared more than 25 million liters of clean drinking water with more than 50,000 families affected by the floods in Thailand.

The packets contain a powdered water-purifying technology developed by P&G and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help reduce sickness and death in developing countries resulting from drinking contaminated water. One packet turns 10 liters of potentially deadly water into clean drinking water.